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The Billion-Dollar Bet on the Future of Magnetic Storage (ieee.org)
For several decades, the areal density of hard disks increased by an average of nearly 40 percent each year. But in recent years, that rate has slowed to around 10 percent. Seagate and Western Digital, the leading manufacturers of hard drives, differ with each other on how to get around this. From a report: In back-to-back announcements in October 2017, Western Digital pledged to begin shipping drives based on what is known as microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) in 2019, and Seagate said it would have drives that incorporate heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) on the market by 2020. If one company's solution proves superior, it will reshape a US $24 billion industry and set the course for a decade of advances in magnetic storage. Companies that wish to store huge amounts of data do have other options, but hard drives are still the go-to choice for enterprise storage needs that fall somewhere between faster, more expensive solid-state drives built on flash memory, and slower, cheaper magnetic tape.
Seagate now aims to debut a 20+ terabyte drive based on HAMR in 2020, and Western Digital promises MAMR drives that will hold roughly 16 TB later this year. Western Digital expects to quickly scale up to MAMR drives with 40 TB of capacity by 2025, while Seagate believes it can achieve similar capacities through HAMR, though it has not publicly stated a target date. Both companies are essentially starting from the same place, with hard drives that share a few key components. The disk, for example, is a thin platter that has been coated with some form of magnetic material made up of countless individual grains, each of which is magnetized in one particular direction. Ten or so grains in a cluster, all with magnetization pointing in the same direction, represent a bit.
Seagate now aims to debut a 20+ terabyte drive based on HAMR in 2020, and Western Digital promises MAMR drives that will hold roughly 16 TB later this year. Western Digital expects to quickly scale up to MAMR drives with 40 TB of capacity by 2025, while Seagate believes it can achieve similar capacities through HAMR, though it has not publicly stated a target date. Both companies are essentially starting from the same place, with hard drives that share a few key components. The disk, for example, is a thin platter that has been coated with some form of magnetic material made up of countless individual grains, each of which is magnetized in one particular direction. Ten or so grains in a cluster, all with magnetization pointing in the same direction, represent a bit.
Have you bought an SSD lately? They are mostly air as it is. There is absolutely no reason these couldn't be packed with newer chips to the same degrees as the solid bricks these drives were a few years back to make 200+TB SSDs. There is no particular reason that we need magnetic drives or similar capacity SSDs should cost significantly more. The drive manufacturers just have a common interest in maximizing return on every bit of infrastructure they own and have formed a consensus around it.
This isn't much different than the Telcos continuing to sell "T1" lines with nonsense about SLAs and guaranteed bandwidth. It had very little to do with offering the best product they could and almost everything to do with maximizing margins at consumer expense.
I'm not saying it isn't good for their businesses but when it comes to technology, artificial scarcity like this impacts R&D and availability of products and services for everyone else in a very pronounced negative way.
Tech companies (and others) are forming virtual international monopolies because they actually understand the work of John Nash and that there is more profit to be had by collaborating. This simply does too much damage for the rest of us to allow in certain key areas like Food production, healthcare, energy, defense, communications and especially technology.
Most free market economists do not account for the work of Nash. The entire concept of an unrestricted market which naturally organizes due to competition and market pressures breaks in a very serious way when you can prove that it can be more profitable to cycle non-loyal consumers between a small number of competitors than to actually compete with them in areas in which would reduce margins for all competitors.